CMN, I'm sure what you are saying makes great logical sense, as does what other posters are saying.
However, being an old fart, and a late conversion to flying (I wish i had done it thirty years ago now), I have this thing about mortality. I also have this thing about bending aeroplanes, and I have the cheque book stubs to prove it.
I would be the first to agree that there are probably infinitely more sophisticated ways of flying almost any aircraft I currently fly. The issue for me however, and I guess the people who trained me and let me use their aircraft, is that us weekend warriors are made of pretty simple clay.
I would therefore like to suggest that it might be more useful to debate the "ideal" checklists to be memorised, rather than tangle up our miserable heads with the shortcomings of what our instructors taught us,
To put it another way: "Let us miserable PPL's keep to our pathetic belief's